Halloween at Ordway
It’s that time of year again. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting chillier, and the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is getting perilously thin.
That’s what the ancient Celts believed, anyway. To them, this dangerous time of year – which they called Samhain (pronounced ‘Saa-wn’, and literally translated as ‘summer’s end’) – was the pivot-point between the light half of the year, concerned with planting and growing and harvesting, and the dark half, when the life-giving sun turned away from them, and life became frighteningly precarious. To protect themselves during this tense time, Celtic people held festivals of sacrifice, offering crops and animals to their gods in large communal bonfires. They often hid themselves from angry or vengeful spirits that might be moving across the veil – you can’t be too careful, after all – by dressing as spirits or animals, themselves. They also sought their own advantage: asking their priests – the Druids – to peer into the future for them, a task temporarily facilitated by the proximity of the supernatural world. The Celts were conquered by the Roman Empire nearly 2000 years ago. Many of their beliefs and practices were buried beneath layers of Roman-style paganism, and later, the Christianity that swept across the Empire’s lands. Samhain, however, managed to remain on this side of the veil, passed down to the modern world as Halloween.
Walking through the oak forest at Ordway right now, it’s hard not to feel something of what the Celts might have felt during Samhain. Mid-autumn is an anxiety-provoking time of year in such a forest, even without the prospect of surviving the coming winter on what’s stored in the root cellar. Reminders of death are everywhere. They rise from the ground, as the earthy odor of decay that sticks in your clothes for days after even a short hike. They rain from the air, too, as the near-constant shower of dead leaves, soft and steady as Scotch mist. They emerge from the vanishing herbs, as the bones of the past year's dead.
The Celts of the British Isles – their culture’s last holdout against Rome, and the likeliest source of the Samhain traditions that seeded Halloween – are likely to have seen, smelled, and perhaps even felt, similar things to me as they walked the forests that surrounded their villages. This is because the climate is similar enough between Minnesota and Britain to support the widespread occurrence of the same kind of ecosystem: broadleaf deciduous forests. These are forests mostly made up of trees that drop their leaves in autumn, in order to save them from the stresses of winter. In both regions, the specific type of tree that make up those forests are most commonly oaks: members of the taxonomic genus Quercus. This is thanks to the near-miraculous ability of oaks to thrive under the environmental conditions found at this latitude, and to spread their offspring widely. It also helps that they have been doing so for over 50 million years.
If – like me, or an ancient Celt, for that matter – you have spent time in an oak forest during both summer and fall, you might see the Celts’ veil between worlds as an apt descriptor of the seasonal change. The difference is striking. At summer’s peak, an oak forest feels like a giant terrarium: an explosion of life within a protective bubble. The bubble is provided by the forest’s ‘canopy’: the high ceiling created by the crowns of the tallest trees. To maximize exposure to light, each tree spreads its leaves against the sky in a thin layer at the tips of the tallest limbs. In their competition for space, the great trees edge their crowns right up next to each other, close enough that they rub together in a strong wind. From below, the canopy looks like a mosaic of living green tiles, mortared together by the sunlight that breaks through the cracks between the crowns. Beneath the shelter they provide, a unique suite of plants and animals proliferate, protected from the harshest of the elements that buffet the world outside the canopy: midsummer’s desiccating heat, and thunderstorm-driven lashes of wind and rain. Dozens of flowering plant species form a thick herbaceous layer that carpets the forest’s floor. Narrow trails wind through this layer, cut by the habitual movements of white-tailed deer, coyotes, foxes, and wild turkeys. Untold numbers of insects fill the air with their bodies and buzz, and fill the greenery with their offspring.
By Samhain, all that is gone. Of summer’s thick herbaceous layer, only scattered corpses of the most durable species remain. In its place the forest floor is carpeted with millions of dead leaves, remnants of the now-defunct canopy. The October wind shifts them around haphazardly, seemingly unsure of what to do with its newly granted access to the forest’s interior. The dry rasp of shifting leaves is a hollow reminder of the chirrups and trills of summer’s insects, now conspicuous only by their complete absence.
As I walk Ordway’s trails surveying this fresh emptiness, I am struck by the emotional precision of the Celts’ Samhain vision. It feels like a veil has descended here. The forest is recognizably the same as the vividly alive one in my memory of summer, but it seems I am now viewing it through a selective filter, a gauzy barrier that hides the living part of it from my eyes.
As is true surprisingly often, this emotional instinct has a literal counterpart. In this case, the counterpart is ecological. The life I can no longer see has indeed gone somewhere else; somewhere invisible to me. Paradoxically, that place is also all around me. For example, many of the insects whose silence is so deafening are not dead but dormant, their bodies or, more likely, the offspring who will move their genetic lineage forward, tucked away into tiny cracks in tree bark, or hidden pockets of fallen leaves, or beneath the surface of the soil. It’s a smart strategy in this environment. The approaching winter will bring many dangers to any organism that chooses to face them head on. Sub-freezing temperatures can turn the water in their bodies to shards of ice that slice apart the very cells from which those bodies are made. Freezing air holds little water, creating a desert-like atmosphere that can steal the remaining liquid moisture from living bodies. Blizzards and ice storms damage bodies directly.
Faced with such threats, the majority of organisms living in the climatic zones that create them opt for the strategy used by the insects. Slumber looks different for different organisms, but has some basic similarities. Insects avoid storm damage by hiding in protective nooks or crannies. Trees do so by covering the living portion of their bodies – a thin layer of tissue just beneath the outer bark – in a durable non-living coat, and filling it with solid, non-living wood. The herbs of the forest floor protect themselves by hiding the still-living portion of their bodies in the soil. In whatever place an organism might physically protect itself, it then enters a state of suspended animation. The biochemical reactions that keep it alive slow to the point where they are virtually undetectable. This saves resources, scarce in the cold and dark of winter. It also allows organisms to lose much of the water their bodies contain when active, minimizing the threat of freezing-related damage. In this protective state, such organisms approach a literal version of the Celtic veil, coming as close as physically possible to death.
But winter never has the final word. In the stories of Samhain, travel across the veil moves in both directions. The spirits it obscures are able, when the veil thins at Samhain, to move back to the land of the living. In the actual ecosystem, the movement is in the other direction: the slumbering organisms of the forest approach death during Samhain. But they will awake once again in the spring, at the opposite spoke of Earth’s great orbital wheel, during the time the Celts called Beltane. When they do, they will depend on the component of the ecosystem that, paradoxically, is most associated with death in the mind of most humans: the soil. Soil is very nearly a literal version of the Celtic veil: a cold, elemental surface that collects the bodies of the dead and returns their living spirit to the world. The ways in which it does this would have been utterly unknown to the Celts, but are, in their biological details, miraculous in ways the Celtic spirit may have appreciated. We will investigate some in this blog when Beltane comes around. For now – happy (late) Halloween!
Walking through the oak forest at Ordway right now, it’s hard not to feel something of what the Celts might have felt during Samhain. Mid-autumn is an anxiety-provoking time of year in such a forest, even without the prospect of surviving the coming winter on what’s stored in the root cellar. Reminders of death are everywhere. They rise from the ground, as the earthy odor of decay that sticks in your clothes for days after even a short hike. They rain from the air, too, as the near-constant shower of dead leaves, soft and steady as Scotch mist. They emerge from the vanishing herbs, as the bones of the past year's dead.
The Celts of the British Isles – their culture’s last holdout against Rome, and the likeliest source of the Samhain traditions that seeded Halloween – are likely to have seen, smelled, and perhaps even felt, similar things to me as they walked the forests that surrounded their villages. This is because the climate is similar enough between Minnesota and Britain to support the widespread occurrence of the same kind of ecosystem: broadleaf deciduous forests. These are forests mostly made up of trees that drop their leaves in autumn, in order to save them from the stresses of winter. In both regions, the specific type of tree that make up those forests are most commonly oaks: members of the taxonomic genus Quercus. This is thanks to the near-miraculous ability of oaks to thrive under the environmental conditions found at this latitude, and to spread their offspring widely. It also helps that they have been doing so for over 50 million years.
If – like me, or an ancient Celt, for that matter – you have spent time in an oak forest during both summer and fall, you might see the Celts’ veil between worlds as an apt descriptor of the seasonal change. The difference is striking. At summer’s peak, an oak forest feels like a giant terrarium: an explosion of life within a protective bubble. The bubble is provided by the forest’s ‘canopy’: the high ceiling created by the crowns of the tallest trees. To maximize exposure to light, each tree spreads its leaves against the sky in a thin layer at the tips of the tallest limbs. In their competition for space, the great trees edge their crowns right up next to each other, close enough that they rub together in a strong wind. From below, the canopy looks like a mosaic of living green tiles, mortared together by the sunlight that breaks through the cracks between the crowns. Beneath the shelter they provide, a unique suite of plants and animals proliferate, protected from the harshest of the elements that buffet the world outside the canopy: midsummer’s desiccating heat, and thunderstorm-driven lashes of wind and rain. Dozens of flowering plant species form a thick herbaceous layer that carpets the forest’s floor. Narrow trails wind through this layer, cut by the habitual movements of white-tailed deer, coyotes, foxes, and wild turkeys. Untold numbers of insects fill the air with their bodies and buzz, and fill the greenery with their offspring.
By Samhain, all that is gone. Of summer’s thick herbaceous layer, only scattered corpses of the most durable species remain. In its place the forest floor is carpeted with millions of dead leaves, remnants of the now-defunct canopy. The October wind shifts them around haphazardly, seemingly unsure of what to do with its newly granted access to the forest’s interior. The dry rasp of shifting leaves is a hollow reminder of the chirrups and trills of summer’s insects, now conspicuous only by their complete absence.
As I walk Ordway’s trails surveying this fresh emptiness, I am struck by the emotional precision of the Celts’ Samhain vision. It feels like a veil has descended here. The forest is recognizably the same as the vividly alive one in my memory of summer, but it seems I am now viewing it through a selective filter, a gauzy barrier that hides the living part of it from my eyes.
As is true surprisingly often, this emotional instinct has a literal counterpart. In this case, the counterpart is ecological. The life I can no longer see has indeed gone somewhere else; somewhere invisible to me. Paradoxically, that place is also all around me. For example, many of the insects whose silence is so deafening are not dead but dormant, their bodies or, more likely, the offspring who will move their genetic lineage forward, tucked away into tiny cracks in tree bark, or hidden pockets of fallen leaves, or beneath the surface of the soil. It’s a smart strategy in this environment. The approaching winter will bring many dangers to any organism that chooses to face them head on. Sub-freezing temperatures can turn the water in their bodies to shards of ice that slice apart the very cells from which those bodies are made. Freezing air holds little water, creating a desert-like atmosphere that can steal the remaining liquid moisture from living bodies. Blizzards and ice storms damage bodies directly.
Faced with such threats, the majority of organisms living in the climatic zones that create them opt for the strategy used by the insects. Slumber looks different for different organisms, but has some basic similarities. Insects avoid storm damage by hiding in protective nooks or crannies. Trees do so by covering the living portion of their bodies – a thin layer of tissue just beneath the outer bark – in a durable non-living coat, and filling it with solid, non-living wood. The herbs of the forest floor protect themselves by hiding the still-living portion of their bodies in the soil. In whatever place an organism might physically protect itself, it then enters a state of suspended animation. The biochemical reactions that keep it alive slow to the point where they are virtually undetectable. This saves resources, scarce in the cold and dark of winter. It also allows organisms to lose much of the water their bodies contain when active, minimizing the threat of freezing-related damage. In this protective state, such organisms approach a literal version of the Celtic veil, coming as close as physically possible to death.
But winter never has the final word. In the stories of Samhain, travel across the veil moves in both directions. The spirits it obscures are able, when the veil thins at Samhain, to move back to the land of the living. In the actual ecosystem, the movement is in the other direction: the slumbering organisms of the forest approach death during Samhain. But they will awake once again in the spring, at the opposite spoke of Earth’s great orbital wheel, during the time the Celts called Beltane. When they do, they will depend on the component of the ecosystem that, paradoxically, is most associated with death in the mind of most humans: the soil. Soil is very nearly a literal version of the Celtic veil: a cold, elemental surface that collects the bodies of the dead and returns their living spirit to the world. The ways in which it does this would have been utterly unknown to the Celts, but are, in their biological details, miraculous in ways the Celtic spirit may have appreciated. We will investigate some in this blog when Beltane comes around. For now – happy (late) Halloween!
MDA
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